[Mesa-dev] [PATCH 2/2] egl: add EGL_platform_device support

[Mathias Fröhlich]

Hi Marek,

On Wednesday, 24 April 2019 02:01:42 CEST Marek Olšák wrote:
> Adam, did you notice my original suggestion "If there is at least 1 drm
> device, swrast won't be in the list."? which means swrast would be in the
> list for your "dumb" GPUs.

Imagine a box with a low end drm capable hardware chip like you find sometimes
in server type boxes (intel/matrox...). Otherwise the box is equipped with lots of cpu
power. This is something that you will find a lot in that major engineering application
environment. Your application will be glad to find the swrast renderer that is finally
more capable than the 'GPU' mostly there to drive an administration console.
You do not want to lock a swrast 'device' (or however you want to call it) out by
a may be less capable 'console GPU'.

Beside that having a second type of 'normalized renderer' like Eric was telling
about is an other one.

As well as sometimes it may make sense to utilize the GPU
with one set of work and a second GPU with an other set of work in parallel.
When you only find a single gpu device in one box, you may be glad to find
a swrast device that you can make use of in parallel with the gpu without the need
to put up different code paths in your application.

May be I can come up with other cases, but thats the 5 minutes for now ...

best

Mathias